Fired U.s. Chemist Gets Soviet Asylum

MOSCOW — A chemist fired from a Houston cancer research center was given political asylum Wednesday in the Soviet Union, which claimed he was persecuted in the United States for his social activism.

''I am happy that this nightmare is behind me for good,'' Arnold Lokshin was quoted as saying in an interview with the official Tass news agency. ''We are in for a free life now.''

Lokshin apparently is the American who Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze recently said was seeking political asylum because of persecution in the United States. U.S. officials said they do not know who he is.

Tass said Lokshin got a Ph.D. from Harvard University and had done research there and at the University of Southern California and was director of a cancer research clinic at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston.

Both Harvard and USC said they had no record of Lokshin, and St. Joseph Hospital said he was fired in August over his ''job performance'' as a pharmacologist and chemist at its cancer research lab.

Lokshin, described by Tass as a harassed social activist, was shown on Soviet television with his family and was featured in other official media.

''We were informed Sunday evening that our request for political asylum in the Soviet Union was granted and we went to Washington, D.C., and from there we took the flight Tuesday directly to the Soviet Union,'' Lokshin said on Radio Moscow.

''We left our house, we left our car, we left virtually all our possesions in Houston,'' Lokshin said. ''The lives and well-being of my children, especially, and my wife and myself were more important than these possessions.''

Lokshin, 47, although saying he is not a communist, said he and his family had suffered organized persecution because of his opposition to unspecified U.S. government policies. ''I'm sure it was organized by some political police.''